February 2012
2 posts
6 tags
THE SKIN I LIVE IN, TOMBOY
“There is the outline of a body, distinct, separate, its integrity an illusion, a tragic deception, because unseen there is a slit between the legs, and he has to push into it. There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist with intercourse: with being entered. The vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart. The thrusting is a persistent invasion. She is...
January 2012
3 posts
5 tags
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“At the Dinky Donut, outside town, Bob Pardee sat quietly as the family ate and talked. The soft pink golfer’s face had begun to droop from his skull. His flesh seemed generally to sag, giving him the hangdog look of someone under strict orders to lose weight. His hair was expensively cut and layered, a certain amount of color combed in, a certain amount of technology brought to bear,...
favorite films of the 21st century
Inspired by this list by Liketx, I’ve compiled this list of my favorite films of the 21st century in alphabetical order. It’s mostly so I can keep track of this stuff myself, but go see these if you haven’t already. Also, obviously, I have not seen nearly as many movies as I would need to to make this list anything nearing authoritative. But as it is now:
A.I. Artificial...
December 2011
7 posts
5 tags
Should sex offenders be allowed to participate in...
This post is not a direct response to, but was informed and inspired by this post on Daily Kos. If you are concerned with knowing exactly what I am referring to, it is recommended, but not absolutely necessary, to read it first.
Essentially, though, you need to know this: during the time when the Occupy Boston camp was active (it is now gone), there was a level 3 sex offender staying there. This...
3 tags
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YOUNG ADULT
I have a Midwest problem. I was born and raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and many of my friends and almost all of my family still live there. After high school, almost everyone I knew went to college in-state or didn’t go at all. I understand that towns like this can be a hard place to leave, for a variety of factors, and I understand that the longer you tend to stay, the less energy you have...
4 tags
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN
In Lynne Ramsay’s first film in nine years, We Need to Talk About Kevin, ‘the problem with no name’ becomes named. Giving up her dream career as an ‘adventurer,’ Tilda Swinton becomes a mother and caretaker for her newborn son; Ramsay’s conceit is to play this off not as merely an investigation of the ‘feminine mystique,’ but as a complete living...
1 tag
It is nice and strange...
…to see something I posted be ‘reblogged’ and commented on a whole bunch of times, especially when that thing is a brief analysis of racism in The Muppets. I take this to indicate that a lot of people pick up on things like this, even if only a select few take time to write about it on the Internet. Wise up, Hollywood.
Anyway, I will take this as a good excuse to post here more....
JLG AT 81
To my embarrassment, I somehow missed that Saturday was Jean-Luc Godard’s birthday. He turned 81.
As anyone who knows me well at all knows, I am a Godard acolyte of the highest order. This man is a singular artistic influence and presence; and despite what you may have heard, he’s still going strong—last year’s Film Socialisme, though hardly seen, proved that Godard can...
5 tags
Racial Coding in 'The Muppets'
Since I can safely assume that very few people other than myself are interested in decoding the racialism in The Muppets, I’ll keep this very to the point.
As I posted before, the above is a picture of the villains in the new Muppets film.
These characters are only the most blatantly racist exponents of the racially-coded rural-urban dichotomy that props up the film’s structure.
...
November 2011
3 posts
1 tag
5 tags
Aki Kaurismaki's LE HAVRE
Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre opened last weekend here in Boston and my enthusiasm for it is in line with damn near everyone else’s. However, with the company I keep it’s been seen as much less than touted—I was going to write about it anyway, but this disagreement gave me a reason to offer a more spirited defense.
Le Havre primarily involves four characters: Marcel Marx, a...
5 tags
October 2011
1 post
on 'arthouse'
“I’ve recently been thinking that a considerable portion of what I find the most detestable in contemporary commercial filmmaking can be summed up in a single trend: exploitation movies that go out into the world as “serious” art movies. Admittedly, two very early examples of this trend in talkies, Lang’s M and Hawks’ Scarface, are two of the greatest movies ever made, though neither of...
September 2011
1 post
August 2011
12 posts
RETRACTION: Those last two posts are to be disregarded, but are remaining intact for the historical record.
Guys, I just saw “Ghostbusters 2” for the first time and I have to say, it far surpasses anything David Lynch has ever directed.
burger brainzzzzz
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THE GUARD (brief notes on race)
The Guard is the debut film directed by John Michael McDonagh (brother to Martin) and I had the severe misfortune of seeing it last weekend. It is thoroughly unpleasant: his dialogue is all weak jabs so obviously striving for the muscle of his older brother’s, the plot is a shambles, the photography is repellent, etc. But, one line stood out to me: when Brendan Gleeson learns Don...
3 tags
“As a hip-hop feminist, I’ve often felt like I had to defend hip-hop from...”
– Julianne Escobedo Shepherd in Guernica with her piece “How Teen Rap Group Odd Future Turned a Posse of Nerdy White Male Critics Into Rape Apologists.”
1 tag
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MONTE HELLMAN, ROAD TO NOWHERE
Monte Hellman was at the HFA tonight for a Q&A session following the area premiere of his new film Road to Nowhere. The Q&A itself was as cloying as these things usually are, but the manner of its awfulness was surprisingly pertinent this time around—as always, the interviewer was some supposed film snob who came prepared with a handful of obscure names to drop* and superlatives to bestow,...
2 tags
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CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE and TERRI (Or men who don't...
The dominant archetype of modern romantic comedies is the ‘man-child.’ It is often remarked that films today treat the audience as children (studios fire back: our audience is children), but it is not quite so often pointed out that films today treat their characters as children as well. We expect this from Sandler and Ferrell, but recently the symptoms have spread. Terri and Crazy, Stupid,...
July 2011
1 post
June 2011
4 posts
2 tags
This Side of Paradise: Woody Allen's 'Midnight in...
“Why would I read a biography of Rodin?” - Owen Wilson (Gil) in Midnight in Paris “For principal roles, I don’t know the black experience well enough to really write about it with any authenticity. In fact, most of my characters are so limited locally. They’re mostly New Yorkers, kind of upper-class, educated, neurotic. It’s almost the only thing that I ever...
3 tags
The Thirteen Dead Girls in the Paparazzi video
fuckyeahladygaga:
Submitted by EKTOPLASM.
Needless to say, I’m still waiting for the full-scale media attack on Lady Gaga’s eroticization of dead women. I’d even be okay with a reaction that was only a tiny fraction of the size and scope of the blitzkrieg descending on Kanye West right now (or, on the flip side, I’d love to see the media spend as much time analyzing...
2 tags
“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should...
May 2011
3 posts
1 tag
4 tags
April 2011
6 posts
2 tags
3 tags
So, I guess we made a movie? Am I done now?
PS: The title is SWIM WHO CAN, it is 18 minutes and 54 seconds long, and it’s a collaboration with my best of friends, Jon Ehrlich.
3 tags
“The big lie about capitalism is that everyone can be rich. That’s impossible....”
– Michael Rivero (via ofaquitaine, fucknobigbrother)
—
I have three quick points to make about this quote/post (and not necessarily this one specifically; there are plenty like it, but I chose this one). One is how easy it is on Tumblr (or other similar platforms) for things to get reblogged...
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This Is Just To Say
I have sheared
the children
that were under
the backpack
and which
you were probably
grinding
for sex
Forgive me
they were unsuitable
so incredible
and so bright
—
Probably my favorite creation yet on the William Carlos Williams Poem Generator.
3 tags
March 2011
14 posts
2 tags
2 tags
2 tags
"Any Moment," (1970)
0 ANY MOMENT PREVIOUS TO THE PRESENT MOMENT 1 THE PRESENT MOMENT AND ONLY THE PRESENT MOMENT 2 ALL APARENTLY INDIVIDUAL OBJECTS DIRECTLY EXPERIENCED BY YOU AT 1 3 ALL OF YOUR RECOLLECTION AT 1 OF APPARENTLY INDIVIDUAL OBJECTS DIRECTLY EXPERIENCED BY YOU AT 0 AND KNOWN TO BE IDENTICAL WITH 2 4 ALL CRITERIA BY WHICH YOU MIGHT DISTINGUISH BETWEEN MEMBERS OF 3 AND 2 5 ALL...
6 tags
what these 'historically hardcore' things are...
So “a series of Smithsonian promo posters designed by Jenny Burrows as part of a portfolio project” are sort of making their way through the Internet. They can be found here.
Here’s two of them.
Fun racial implications abound in the first one; the most obvious is the classification of 50 Cent’s speech as ‘whining,’ which is nothing except another...
3 tags
